The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined
that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor,
Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University.

More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did
not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously
deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing,
conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

Comments

More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities.

The sound you just heard was the wailing and gnashing of teeth from Mosher and Fuller.

Tim, you need to just cut & paste the word “yet” and keep it handy, because you’ll need it for the “climate scientists cleared yet yet yet again”, and the “climate scientists cleared yet yet yet yet again” topics which will undoubtedly be out soon.

Virginia State Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is still going after Mann, and using the exact same “evidence” as used in all the inquiries by various different authorities which have found there is no case to answer. Apparently even though he passed the bar exams, he’s not terribly bright.

That is odd. You’d think such a report would be very careful indeed to get all details correct. McIntyre’s name appears 6 times, 5 times with “Dr.” and once with “Mr.” The only correct title is within a quote from Mann.

Do we have to check the whole thing looking for stupid errors like that?

Can McKintyre and McKitrick now show us their reconstruction of temperatures for the past 1000 years, they have had 10 years to do the work, 10 years to gather the mountains of evidence that the earth has been warming during that period and with there vastly superior statistical skills it should be bullit proof by now.

In science when you disagree with a conclusion you show how it should be done, what the correct one is. Not just whine that others are doing it wrong.

dorlomin, I think McI’s claim is that it may not be possible to reconstruct temperatures in the past 1000 years with any degree of precision, because the proxy data are too unreliable. I don’t think much of McI in general, but that is not an unreasonable claim.

Imagine that someone claimed to be able to predict the weather (not climate, weather) six months in advance. (Maybe a writer for the Old Farmer’s Almanac?) You challenge that person and claim their predictions are nonsense. Would you be obligated to offer your own competing prediction?

I suppose a different way of looking at this is that McI could offer a reconstruction that just had humongous error bars. In my weather analogy, that would be like saying “Okay, six months from now the temperature in New York will be 0 C plus or minus 30 C.”

We do temperature reconstructions for the entire Phanerozoic era, 540 million years. Every year we gain new data and better technology. Every year we advance our understanding of the past. We do this by doing the difficult things that have large error bars and improving on them.

Not by shoving our hands in our pockets and moaning “you are doing it wrong”. If Mann and company have shown to much accuracy not enough error bars, lets see a reconstruction that fits the data better.

Dr. Lotharsson is not amused. (That’s not intended to be humourous – in real life I have a Ph.D., as do any number of commenters here.)

I wonder perhaps if it’s a deliberate strategy to see if the auditors will point out the error? 😉 You know, like some development processes where deliberate errors are inserted, and the proportion of discovery of deliberate errors used to infer how roughly many unintentional errors are likely to remain?

Imagine that someone claimed to be able to predict the weather (not climate, weather) six months in advance. (Maybe a writer for the Old Farmer’s Almanac?) You challenge that person and claim their predictions are nonsense. Would you be obligated to offer your own competing prediction?

J, the essential difference is that you can check the weather six months from now. So, just predict the average weather for the same time of year over the last ten years or so, and demonstrate that you do no worse. This is also how you show up astrologers (by getting just as happy customers by presenting the very same predictions rotated one zodiac sign forward), etc. Big Placebo.

With proxy reconstructions you cannot send back thermometers in a time machine, so you have to test quality by using the internal consistency of the data, e.g., by removing subcategories of proxies and seeing how sensitive the result is to that. What you do not do is treat it as a bookkeeping exercise: just follow the rules, apply best practices and get the correct result. Getting McI to do this for himself would have the merit of confronting him with this reality.

I’m originally from Pittsburgh, PA area (and did all 3 degrees at Penn State and am still in frequent contact).

This story in Pittsbrugh paper was sort-of-reasonable, given that it’s published by Richard Mellon Scaife…. but Lindzen comes through (read article for context):

“But Richard S. Lindzen, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of meteorology who disagrees with Mann’s work, called the school’s investigation a “whitewash.” Lindzen was interviewed by the Penn State panel during its investigation.

“Penn State has clearly demonstrated that it is incapable of monitoring violations of scientific standards of behavior internally,” Lindzen said in an e-mail from France.”

Don’t know if this will get through moderation or not, or whether it’ll have any impact on the readers at WUWT, but I had to at least try.
—-
There appears to be a misunderstanding here of how seriously Penn State must take allegations of research misconduct. Between 2006 and 2009, when Mann joined the PSU faculty, PSU earned $2.8 billion in research grants. Over that same period, Mann brought in $1.8 million. That’s 0.06% of the total research grants. Does anyone here seriously believe that PSU would risk the other 99.94% of research grants to protect ANY single researcher, no matter how respectable they’re perceived to be?

PSU is a tier-one research university. That means that their reputation is everything, and if they hadn’t been completely certain that Mann’s behavior was within acceptable norms for his field, he would have been tossed to the wolves to protect the university.

Let’s try putting this a different way. Suppose someone claims to have developed some new understanding. (It could be a way of predicting the climate in the past or the future, it could be a correlation between nosepicking and cancer, the details don’t matter).

Now, let’s say you don’t believe the data actually support their model. There are two ways you could point this out. One, you could provide a competing and more successful model — you could propose a different temperature reconstruction/prediction, and show that it fits the data better (for a future prediction, this would require waiting a while), or you could show that asbestos or smoking has more explanatory value in cancer cases.

Alternatively, you could also just show that their model or their understanding is inherently flawed. Due to the chaotic nature of weather, it’s just not possible to predict it six months in advance. Due to the coarse spatial and temporal resolution of proxies, it’s not possible to deduce that it was 17C and sunny on a given Tuesday afternoon at a particular hillside in Anatolia in 5037 BCE. Respondents thought the nosepicking survey was a joke and so the data are worthless.

Both of those are reasonable ways to critique someone else’s model. I don’t think it’s reasonable to insist that McI has to create his own reconstruction, when his argument is that the data aren’t precise enough to support any nontrivial reconstruction.

That doesn’t mean I agree that McI actually has shown anything meaningful. I just don’t agree with dorlomin’s suggestion that if you disagree with someone’s reconstruction you’re somehow obligated to offer a better one.

J, you seem to me to be saying that a constituent proxy group such as dendrochronology is one of what the Watt’s crowd would term a non-science.

You do understand that more than a single type of proxy is used and that they’ve been calibrated against the existing instrumental record where that is possible? Hence the concern over the post 1960 decline where the correlation breaks down in some – and it’s only some – cases.

No, chek, I’m not saying that proxy-based paleoclimate studies are non-science. I’m also not saying that Mann’s work is non-science.

Forget entirely about Mann, climate science, etc. Just, in the abstract, if someone proposes a model and you think there are problems with it, there are at least two ways to point that out. You can propose a competing model and show that it fits the data better. Or you can point out conceptual flaws in the way their model works. Both of those are valid approaches. That’s all I’m saying.

That bears about as much relationship to anything you’ve ever said as your version does to anything I’ve said.

More seriously, I know I probably come across as a concern troll in this thread, but I’m really not. The larger issue here is that I think those of us on the pro-science side have to at least understand how the “unskeptical skeptics” think and what their actual arguments are.

When someone says “It’s not possible to do X” there are a range of appropriate responses, but those do not include “Well, if you don’t like the way Mann does X you should try doing it better yourself.”

People are much more likely to accept your arguments if you make it clear that you understand what they’re saying.

McIntyre was right in picking flaws in Mann’s work. Actually, what I mean is, an abstract McIntyre was right in pointing out abstract flaws in an abstract Mann’s work.

No, I’m not actually arguing that McIntyre was right in picking ‘flaws’ in Mann’s work! What I’m saying is that other people are arguing that McIntyre was right in picking ‘flaws’ in Mann’s work! I’m not a concern troll! Really! I’m just being misunderstood!

No, frank, that is not what J is saying at all.
J is simply pointing out that what McIntyre claimed is a valid argument – if (counterfactually) dendrochronology had error bars so large as to contain essentially no information, then one could reject the use of dendrochronology in the construction of a model without providing a competing model.

McIntyre is wrong, but he is not wrong due to his failure to provide a model – he is wrong because one can’t reject dendrochronology out of hand like he claims. It behooves us to correctly identify the errors in the denialist’s logic, so that they can’t pick nits to confuse the underinformed listeners… after all, it’s all they’ve got short of outright lying, so why not deny them that refuge?

In general, when you’re engaged in a debate it’s helpful to be able to convince your opponent (or neutral bystanders) that you understand her/his argument first, before you proceed to demolish it. If people think that your opponent is making claims and you’re not understanding them or not addressing them, they’ll draw the conclusion that you can’t answer them and thus you must be wrong.

McI et al. are making two kinds of claims — the methods used by Mann are problematic, and the proxy data aren’t good enough to support a reconstruction with any reasonable degree of precision. I think the first claim is obviously groundless, since other reconstructions by other people have produced similar “hockey sticks” while using very different methods. I’m less confident about the second claim but as a non-expert I’m willing to defer to the actual experts on the pro-science side and assume that they know whereof they speak. But that’s the case that people should be making. How exactly does it help our side to stop talking about the science and move the debate into the realm of propaganda, insults, and feel-good talking points? That’s their home turf! Any time this becomes a battle of illogical and non-responsive arguments, the denialists will win.

There, that should be long enough to give frank plenty of fodder for his next “shortening”. I’m looking forward to seeing it

> With proxy reconstructions you cannot send back thermometers in a time machine, so you have to test quality by using the internal consistency of the data, e.g., by removing subcategories of proxies and seeing how sensitive the result is to that.

Your response was to ignore him and try to make your argument more and more abstract to the point of uselessness.

>McI et al. are making two kinds of claims — the methods used by Mann are problematic, and the proxy data aren’t good enough to support a reconstruction with any reasonable degree of precision.

The first claim is dependent on the second claim. De-centered PCA is only unreliable if some substantial portion of the data is spuriously correlated.

But then, IMHO, what MBH did wasn’t de-centered PCA at all, but short segmented PCA, which is kind of necessary for estimating uncertainties; PCA wasn’t directly performed on the proxies, but the instrumental record; and the reasons for using the 1901 – 1980 segment for proxy calibration are pretty straight forward (i.e., the most, the most accurate and the most homogeneous instrumental data).

For those who might be tempted to think that a tier-one university might engage in whitewash for the sake of an employee, read here to see how unlikely that is. Basically, a university’s reputation is its lifeblood (all the more so for a top research school like in this case) and it is far, far better to deal with the fallout of the misconduct of a single employee (no matter how impressive their research credentials) than to deal with the fallout of being involved in a whitewashing operation.

Oh darn, Byron Smith. You guys and your rationality. It’s all about the perception! Logic, smogic, climategate is a whitewash (unless it finds “The Team” guilty of all kinds of scientific fraud), AGW is a hoax, and Al Gore is fat. There. Proven.